The Bundes Committee on Humor is not set to meet for another biennium cycle. Until then, no proposals for next joke shall be heard.
azimir
joined 2 years ago
At one point my 1GB disk was the "big one" in the dorm. It was the windows share of some random media. I had room for the whole 40MB videos "Jesus vs Frosty" (The Spirit of Christmas) and "Jesus vs Santa Claus". It was before South Park became an actual show, but people watched those 100's of times off my hard drive.
When I bought a 3GB from Fry's it was an open question how we'd fill it. Of course, that was just as the mp3 codec started to gain traction... Problem solved.
I have it on the shelf, but haven't gotten to it. I'll put it in the reading queue.
There was also a competition (long ago) to see who could build a computer that would successfully boot Windows 95. The goal was to boot the slowest possible time (no arbitrary delays allowed).
The winner wrote a shim that emulated a floating point unit of the i486 so it would boot on a i386 (no floating point). The result was... booting after many weeks. They won big time.
I did some similar stuff on a Raspberry Pi. I had to NFS mount my desktop and make a swapdisk on the NFS mount to have enough RAM to build. It wasn't fast, but it did eventually work.
We used a RPi 4 for a Plex server for a while. It was fine except it couldn't do any live transcoding or handle h265 worth beans.
I upgraded to an OrangePi 5. I'm on a sata drive for the OS and a external USB disk for media. The thing is amazing!
No, it's not a $50 computer. Yes, it works great.
I love RPi boards, but their hardware limitations are quick to be found as you move past simple hobbyist projects.
Do you remember the article about some university that accidentally walled in a Network server? It ran for years until they needed to put hands on it for something. They had to do the "follow the Ethernet cable" game until it went through the sheetrock into a dead space.
The Register still has the article from 2001: https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/
VAX/VMS was such a beast! The hardware wasn't readily available to the public, though.
Oh, the wireless chipsets in the 90's into about 2005? or so...that was a bad time for anyone trying to run wireless. Hell, MS Windows didn't even have network drivers baked in until what, WinXP? Wiring computer together in the 90's was such a a trial, both for hardware and software fronts.
I was lucky to score a 3Com 3c905b fast 10/100 Ethernet card from a bussy in 1996. That was well supported across the board (Linux and Windows), and the IRQ settings for the PCI bus memory mapped I/O and IRQs was well documented.
Edit: buddy, not a hussy, though he kinda was... Your call in how you want to read it.
I'm a Cryptonomicon person. The modern timeline is dated now, but the overall information warfare themes are delicious.
I was there Gandalf...
In comparison to the alternatives we had at the time, Linux was a fucking tank. Once it was up, you could expect to get 6 months to years of uptime unless you were installing new tools or changing hardware (no real USB/SATA yet, so hardware was a reboot situation).
If you got a Win98 machine up, it would eventually just hang. Yes, some could got a whole, but if you used it for general use it would crash the kernel out eventually. Same for MacOS (the OG MacOS).
The only real completion for stability was other UNIX systems, and few of those were available to the general public at a reasonable price point.
Way back in the day we'd download Britney Spears and My Little Pony(tm) distros. Times change, I guess.
I've been accused of being a bot in online games due to my robust vocabulary, resistance to abbreviation and slang, as well as pedantic punctuation use. It has been happening for decades.
Note: rarely have I been accused of a being a bot for my skill at gameplay. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.
Now, if you wish to truly delve the depths of linguistic proclivities, one should peruse the works of Terry Pratchett, especially the Discworld novels. Any and all of his works are wonderful prose and deep storytelling.